Mugabe is expired political and historical merchandise

THE mentally "young" and politically "restless" Psychology Maziwisa has taken to political blogging with the gusto of an infant bird at first flight - unequal to the demands of the heights, rudderless of the destination and ill-equipped against the storm, only to end up on the ground, puffing and panting, defeated by his own blind enthusiasm and hostile questions of offended audiences.

In his latest gibberish titled "Mugabe's journey, thorniest and most difficult outside the biblical narrative", Maziwisa makes outlandish claims about Mugabe's imagined and confabulated accomplishments which he insists has made Mugabe "outshine all leaders, dead and alive, including Barack Obama and probably even, Nelson Mandela."

Only a good candidate for a lunatic asylum would give himself the task that Maziwisa has assumed - trying to beautify the ugly face of a tyrant and to perfume the smelly political behind of a despot.

Maziwisa's is a clear fool's errand, a Shakespearean "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" and convincing no-one, even the despot himself who by now knows that his destination and that of his running goons is the blistering incinerators of unforgiving history.

In trying to repackage and sell old Mugabe to a world that has long rejected him, Maziwisa is not just issuing political bad breath, but is the deluded salesman selling dubious political goods that have long passed their sell-by date. Mugabe is expired political and historical merchandise.

I write in this article, not to respond to Maziwisa's offensive political graffiti or just to expose his infidelity to facts, but to insist to Mugabe's victims that as world affairs stand, and as the political condition of Zimbabwe further declines, the political and historical demise of Mugabe and indeed Mugabeism, to the relief and victory of survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing is no longer a farfetched dream but a reality that looms in the visible horizons of time.

We must make Mugabe a Noah without his ark who, while he can hear the sound of the approaching flood, cannot flee or protect himself and his fellow offenders from their victims who have come for their pound of justice for crimes against humanity.

To start with, the agenda of commentators like Psychology Maziwisa must be scrutinised as it appears to be an insult to Mugabe's victims as much as it is a celebration of genocide and laughter at the tears of the bereaved. Talking about the legacy of Nelson Mandela, Cornel West remarked that "no-one doubts Nelson Mandela's heroism, but when a saint is announced, doubt the saintliness and question the saint makers."

In this case, those like Maziwisa who are making throw-away statements about Mugabe being a hero and a saviour in spite of his diabolic crimes against humanity must be questioned and their sinister agenda exposed.

Childish and simplistic, excited singers for supper like Maziwisa are trying to root their political profiles on the fertile ashes of a burnt and finished tyrant. In the process, these supper musicians are not only singing songs that are in bad taste as far as they put salt on the wounds of Mugabe's victims, but are also choosing wrong themes and dangerous subjects to toy with.

One wonders if the time is not now that victims of the Gukurahundi genocide and mass murder should start pronouncing Fatwas, Infatidas and Jihad against careless communicators who are sold to turning their bereavement and injuries into political sport.

Good readers, what temerity is it for one to call the justifiable complaints and anger of Gukurahundi victims an "obsession" with genocide, which Maziwisa suggests is one of Mugabe's "inconsequential" wrongs that are actually "milder" offenses that should be consigned to the past and forgotten?

From Morgan Tsvangirai's insult that Matabeleland political leaders like Professor Welshman Ncube are not "national" to Emerson Mnangagwa's claim that Gukurahundi is a "closed chapter" and now to political toddling Maziwisa's insulting claims, clearly there are some among the perpetrators of Gukurahundi and their agents who are given to dancing on the mass graves of the victims and laughing at the tears of the orphans. These throw-away political voices amount to negligence and extreme ethnic provocation.

No-one can, like Maziwisa and others have done, attempt to sing Mugabe's heroism without celebrating the Gukurahundi massacres and mocking the tears of the orphans, the pains of those who were raped, the bleeding scars of the injured and the daily travails of the exiles who are scattered throughout the wide world in search of lives that they lost during Mugabe's "moments of madness".

Maziwisa's hallucinations about Mugabe's imagined heroism has indeed become one of the daily usualities of our political lives, but while democratic aspirations compel us to suffer such with politeness, this time Maziwisa has taken Mugabe worship to new depths of absurdity whose insulting effect cannot be easily ignored.

"For a man who has spent virtually all his life fighting for freedom and defending our country's sovereignty and independence," says Maziwisa, Mugabe is owed a massive debt by the people of Zimbabwe. Is it not Mugabe who owes the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands and indeed all humanity justice and the truth for genocide, decades of underdevelopment, economic marginalisation and attempts to destroy their cultures and languages?

For some time now the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands have been forced to live on the left hand side of Zimbabwean history, where their votes are harvested by promising politicians while their pains and troubles continue to be minimised and ignored in the mainstream Zimbabwean project. For how long this political orphanage must continue unremedied is up to the victims themselves to force open the gates of history and destiny once and for all, and get even with their oppressors and killers.

The Mugabe that Maziwisa claims is a decorated soldier of independence against imperialism has been a comic and indeed cosmic sell-out who served British economic and political interests with a smile like a waitress. Without intending to do so, Nathaniel Manheru in his article celebrating Mugabe's latest birthday disclosed how Margaret Thatcher used to phone Mugabe urging him to ignore cases of corruption by his ministers.

It is knowledge in the public domain that even during Gukurahundi, the Thatcher government armed Mugabe's 5th Brigade with machine guns, BBC Panorama have clear footage of a giggling Sydney Sekeramayi watching as British soldiers demonstrate to Mugabe's soldiers how to fire the machine guns. The same Thatcher is on historical record for arming Polpot and his Khmer Rouge that, like Mugabe, massacred thousands in Cambodia. Even the South African Apartheid regime bought the latest fighter planes and guns from the Thatcher regime.

The same Mugabe, in exchange for Zimbabwean land and mining concessions was richly funded by British tycoon Tiny Roland in whose mineshafts in Bhalagwe the 5th Brigade buried its victims, including nine primary school girls that were shot in cold blood on their way from school. Mugabe has been, in his lifetime, a smiling steward of British imperial economic and political interests in Zimbabwe, and Maziwisa should spare us the falsehoods and take them to hell or somewhere near there with him.

In his own interests as a young person, Maziwisa should learn from the mistakes of some of Africa's great sons. Up to today, one of Africa's celebrated scholars, researchers and communicators, aging  Professor Ali Mazrui, besides being verbally lynched by Wole Soyinka for alleged "political and intellectual charlatanry", is still  receiving hostile questions and boycotts from audiences who remember very well a young Mazrui's liaisons with Ugandan despots Apollo Milton Obote and Idi Amin as their advisor and defender in newspaper columns and seminars, just in the fashion that Maziwisa has taken to trying to defend Mugabe from crimes he committed before Maziwisa was even born.

Even veteran defenders of Mugabe like the once iconic intellectual Nathan Shamuyarira have never taken Mugabe worship and praise singing to the "biblical" heights and nauseating depths that Maziwisa has taken it. Why young Maziwisa wants this infamy to rub off to his young name defeats logic and mathematics combined, is it for the jingle of coins from Minister Kasukuwere or just misguided jingoism?

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Dinizulu Mbikokayise Macaphulana is a Zimbabwean writer who is studying in Lesotho. E-mail him: dinizulumacaphulana@yahoo.com